Things I Want to Say (4 page)

No, I had come back to Ridgeway because, after losing a hundred pounds, I needed to find the part of me I’d left here—in the green shingled house on Amaranth Avenue, in the redbrick school that no longer existed and in the cemetery that held the graves of both my mother and father, but where I had never been able to bury the truth.

The Ridgeway High School reunion barbecue was held at City Park, in one of those huge open-air pavilions with dozens of picnic tables and a barbecue pit large enough to roast an entire cow.

I did not arrive early and had abandoned all intentions of “helping out,” figuring Mr. In-love-with-the-sound-of-his-own-voice could handle things by himself. Still, when I turned into the park I was astonished to see cars filling the lot and overflowing onto the side streets. Everyone associated with the class of’86, plus all their relatives, must have showed up for this party. Obviously the reunion was the social event of the season in Ridgeway, maybe even more of a draw than the Lions Club annual Turkey Shoot.

I had to park several blocks away and hike back to the pavilion—not a comfortable proposition in the high-heeled sandals I’d worn. But what were a few blisters compared to all the suffering I’d already done in the pursuit of beauty?

The pavilion itself was packed with men, women and children from teens to toddlers to babes-in-arms. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen so many children. Obviously my classmates were a particularly fertile bunch, present company excepted.

Sometimes it hurts watching children run around. I’d never had any—never been with a man long enough to even
think about it. And Frannie hadn’t wanted children. She hadn’t wanted anyone in her life but me.

I suppose at thirty-eight I wasn’t too old to have a baby, but I was definitely older than most of my peers had been when they’d had children. Some of them had already moved on from parenting to grandparenting.

The first person I recognized in the crowd was none other than Rachel Mayfield—spin-the-bottle Rachel as I’d come to think of her. “Hello, Rachel,” I said as she handed me a blank sticker on which to write my name.

She looked puzzled for a moment, then recognition—and surprise—lit her expression. “Ellen? Ellen Lawrence?”

“That’s me.” I stuck the name tag over my right breast.

“You look wonderful,” she gushed. “I didn’t know it was you for a moment.”

I nodded. “I guess I have changed a little.” Say, by at least sixty-five pounds since I’d last lived in Ridgeway.

“Well gosh, what are you up to these days? Have you moved back to Virginia?”

I shook my head. “California. I own a flower shop in Bakersfield.”

“Your own business. That’s fantastic. And California!” She looked wistful. “That must be great.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What have you been doing?”

“I married Scott Ruston. You remember him, don’t you? He was in our class.”

I almost laughed out loud, remembering the earnest kiss Rachel had laid on Scott at that long-ago birthday party. So the seed of love had been planted early for her. “Of course I remember Scott. Do you have any children?”

“Debby and Scott, Jr.” She pointed out a pair of towheaded preteens who were wrestling over a Frisbee. “You two play nice!” she shouted over the din of conversation.

Scott and Debby paid no attention. Then again, for all they
knew, some other adult was yelling at some other children. There were certainly enough to choose from beneath the pavilion’s roof and scattered about the adjacent grounds.

“It was great to see you,” Rachel said. “I’d better get back to work on these name tags.”

I helped myself to a diet soda from a cooler and began circulating among my former classmates. Most of them didn’t recognize me at first. When they did, their reaction was similar to Rachel’s—shock, then glee, then a kind of wistful envy. The last surprised me. Why would these people who, for the most part, had grown up to be productive, stable adults with families and houses and roots in their hometown or nearby towns be jealous of me? Were they confusing Bakersfield with Hollywood, and my small flower shop with some glamorous profession that required regularly rubbing elbows with movie stars? (Yes, I did provide flowers for movies and television, but I almost never saw an actual star. I worked with set designers and people in charge of props. Not very glamorous, really.)

Or is it merely that whatever we already have becomes so routine that whatever anyone else has looks exciting by comparison?

I was surveying the buffet table for something safe—read low-cal—to munch on when I spotted Marc. He was standing a few feet away, his arm around a bird-thin twentysomething with straight blond hair that fell to her waist.

Before I could move out of range, he turned and spotted me and headed over, bringing the blonde with him. “Are you feeling better?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.” I smiled brightly and avoided his gaze, focused on readjusting the paper napkin I’d wrapped around my can of soda. “I think maybe I was a little overtired from traveling.”

“I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Sandy. Sandy, this is an old classmate of mine, Ellen Lawrence.”

Your girlfriend? I thought maybe she was your daughter.
I didn’t say it, but I definitely thought it. Sandy No-last-name had
trophy wife
practically tattooed on her forehead. “Nice to meet you,” I said with a nod.

She nodded back, but didn’t say anything. She looked bored out of her skull. Why shouldn’t she be? Most of us were closer to her parents’ age. She’d have fit in better with the teenagers who were playing basketball across from the pavilion.

Marc tapped my shoulder, reclaiming my attention. “Call my office Monday and we’ll make an appointment to see some properties I know you’ll love,” he said.

“Right.” So much for my thinking he’d been flirting last night. His mind had been on a big fat commission, not romance.

I know, I should have told him I wasn’t interested in buying anything, but I didn’t want to have to endure ten minutes of him trying to change my mind.

He and Twiggy walked away. I made an ugly face at the two of them behind their backs. Even if Marc hadn’t been the bore of the century, I obviously wasn’t thin enough, or young enough, for him.

“Don’t they make a cute couple?”

I turned and saw Alice standing behind me. She sidled closer and lowered her voice. “I don’t get it. What does a man his age see in a girl that young? I mean, besides the obvious. It’s not as if you can have sex
all
the time. What do they talk about over dinner?”

“I can answer that one. I went out with him last night. I didn’t have to say anything. Marc spent the whole evening talking about himself.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You had dinner with Marc Reynolds? Last night?”

“It wasn’t a date. He thought I was interested in buying
property in Ridgeway. And apparently he assumed I had money and thus was a hot prospect.”

She laughed. “Oh my. And to think I once had a crush on him.”

“
You
had a crush on him?”

Her eyes met mine, the laughter still there. “We all did, didn’t we?”

I smiled. “Guess we did.” Alice and I had shared so much growing up, including, apparently, a crush on the same guy.

Alice took a long drink. I detected the juniper odor of gin. “Did you say you’d never been married?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Never.”

“Smart woman.” She held up her glass. “I need a refill. Come with me?”

I walked with her to the bar and waited while the bartender made her a gin and tonic. I accepted another diet soda. “You don’t drink?” Alice said.

“Not this early.” Alcohol is full of calories and besides, I’ve never held my liquor very well.

Someone announced the barbecue was ready and everyone began lining up for food. Alice and I got in the queue, then ended up at a long table with Rachel and Scott, Marsha Kincaid (now Frisch), and some of the others we’d hung out with in school.

Looking down the table at these familiar-yet-not-familiar faces, I was struck by how odd it was we should all be here together like this. We were years and miles away from the birthday party I’d remembered in my dream last night, yet deep down, we were still those children. Scott had the same high forehead and perpetually quizzical expression I remembered, Rachel still fidgeted like a fourth grader and Marsha, even in adulthood, had the same nervous giggle that had punctuated every gathering of our childhood.

In some ways, it seemed I was the only one who had
changed. All my friends had stayed in our hometown and grown into the lives I’d pictured they would have—marrying, having children, working at Markson’s or other local businesses. I was the only one who’d left the fold.

I looked at them all as they ate and talked and wondered how they saw me. I was a foreigner now, single and childless. The one with the exotic job in the fantasy world of television and movies. I was no longer the chubby girl who chewed my fingernails or ate every cookie in sight, but I was sure something of the girl I’d been remained in me. Something one of them might recognize—maybe Alice? She had known me the best. Was I a stranger to her now, or still her old friend?

“I was sorry to hear about your mom,” Scott said when we’d polished off our ribs and chicken and sausage links and had settled into the malaise that only full stomachs and a warm summer afternoon can bring. “I saw the funeral notice in the paper and thought about you and Frannie.”

“Thank you,” I said, touched that he remembered. “She’d been sick for a while, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected.”

“I heard later that you and Frannie came back to town for the funeral,” Marsha said. “I would have come to the visitation, but there wasn’t one.”

“Frannie didn’t want one,” I said. My sister had insisted there was no one in town she wanted to see and that holding a visitation at the funeral home was pointless. “We only stayed a few days. We had a lot to do, going through Mama’s things and arranging the services and everything.”

“Oh, I understand. But it would have been nice to see you both. It’s been such a long time.” She pushed her empty plate away. “You both left town so suddenly back in high school, we never really got a chance to say goodbye.”

I shifted on the bench. I’d been hoping no one would bring up my sudden departure, and searched for some way to turn the conversation.

I didn’t think fast enough, though. “Why
did
y’all run off like that?” Rachel asked. “None of us could believe it when we heard your mama was still here, but you and Frannie were gone.”

“Oh, you know how it is when you’re that age,” I said breezily. “Frannie heard of a great job opportunity out West and when she invited me to come along, I thought it would be a fun adventure. I mean, what sixteen-year-old doesn’t want to see Hollywood?”
And no, I wasn’t pregnant,
I wanted to add, but didn’t.

After my father died, our house was a sad, tense place and the thought of staying behind without Frannie terrified me. When she’d insisted I come to California with her I’d been only too happy to agree.

“I really envied you both,” Bill Moreland said from the end of the table.

I blinked, startled. “You did?”

“Sure. You were sixteen and you were going off to California with your sister who was only nineteen. No parents. No school if you didn’t want to, nobody to answer to but yourselves.” He grinned. “I would have given my left arm to get away like that.”

“Frannie made me go to school,” I said, but the rest of it had been true—no parents, and no one to answer to but ourselves. That had been the idea, after all. From my perspective of twenty-two years later, I could see what an audacious idea it had been.

“I can’t believe your mother let you go,” Rachel said. “Mine certainly wouldn’t have.”

I tried not to look as self-conscious as I felt. I wasn’t used to being the center of attention like this. When you’re the fat girl, you’re usually more invisible. “She knew Frannie would look after me,” I said. “Plus…she was pretty broken up about my dad. I think she was relieved not to have to worry about the two of us, too.”

I didn’t remember that Mom had raised any objections at all to us leaving. Or maybe it was only that my sister hadn’t given her a chance to object. Frannie had bought two tickets to California with Mama’s credit card and withdrawn all the money she’d saved from her job at Weisman’s Drug Store and hadn’t even mentioned the trip to Mama until our suitcases were packed and waiting in the front hall.

When the taxi came to take us to the airport, Mama didn’t even bother to get up out of her chair. Frannie and I kissed her goodbye, one daughter’s lips pressed to either cheek, but she didn’t look at us or say anything.

Every time we talked on the phone after that, I pictured her sitting in that same chair, in the same gray-and-black dress she’d worn to my father’s funeral. Even when the call came that she was dead, I half expected to walk into the house and find her there, fixed in place, perhaps in need of dusting.

“My mother died two years ago,” Marsha said. “A heart attack. She was only fifty-nine.” She shook her head. “Losing a parent like that is always a shock.” She looked around the table at the rest of us. “It’s one of those things that makes you realize how old we’re all getting.”

“Speak for yourself,” Alice said. She drained the last of a bottle of beer and set it down on the table with a thunk. “Haven’t you heard forty is the new thirty? If we wait long enough, forty will soon be the new twenty-five. We’ll never have to get old.”

“Does that mean my kids will never grow up, either?” Bill shook his head. “Give me old age over perpetual teenagers any day. Or else just take me out back and shoot me.”

We all laughed at that, and the talk turned then to children and grandchildren—whose son played football and whose daughter had won a prize at her dance recital. Someone set a wine cooler in front of me and I accepted it, letting the
murmur of conversation and the buzz of the alcohol wrap around me like a soft blanket.

Just before sunset, a band began setting up at the end of the pavilion. The caterers carted away the leftovers from the barbecue and a different crew draped the picnic tables with white cloths and set out hurricane lamps every two feet down the middle of each table.

Mothers and fathers began corralling children and sending them off with relatives or babysitters. Some people left altogether, but most stayed, drinking and talking and watching the transformation from family picnic to adult reunion.